Abalone Sea Snails
and the English Teacher
I had a teacher once in high school. They taught english and biology and ran up mountains and knew more about botany than the average adult. They sang in a band and in the hallways and flames shot through gesturing fingers that taught us rhetoric: how to tell our story and lift it to other's ears when, all too often, words tend to stall in the spaces between people, scattered to the floor by winds of bias and busyness like sand slipping through cupped hand. That teacher we all have a story and that the shell of experiences we carry around is not something to break out of, but rather part of us and stronger than the sum of its parts, much like the shell of a particular sea snail called abalone.
Now forgive me if that was a tenuous transition, for I don’t come to you as an expert in writing or biomimicry or sea snails or even materials science which I intend to study. As with nature, I am grateful for the people around me who I am able to ask questions and learn from. It was a materials science professor who first told me about abalone, a type of sea snail whose muscled foot is permanently attached to one of the strongest and most resilient shells in the world. Rows of holes along one side of the shell send up little puffs of gas and waste while the inner side reveals the iridescent nacre of pearl. The shell is beautiful, and you could run it over with a truck without fracturing the surface.
Abalone shell is made mostly of calcium carbonate (essentially chalk), but on a microscopic scale it looks like layer upon layer of very thin, stiff hexagonal tiles. These tiles are sandwiched between layers of protein rich gum almost like brick and mortar or, as my professor put it, an oreo cookie and cream. When a shell sustains a blow, the tiles remain intact but tend to slip to either side where the protein gum absorbs the impact and prevents nearby tiles from fracturing.
Abalone shell is stronger than any man-made ceramic, self-assembling, resilient, and made from easily accessible and nontoxic component parts. Scientists are currently trying to recreate its unique structure and properties in materials such as titanium metallic intermetallic laminates that could eventually be used in everything from aircraft parts to artificial bones. I am writing this now from my experiences of the beginning of college, but also largely from what I’ve read, the knowledge of those around me, what I’ve noticed growing up in nature, and all that I’ve seen left to learn. Like my english teacher said, I hope the result is more than the sum of its parts.
